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Wednesday 21st of June 2017

By now we can see that the fourth industrial revolution can provide a solid competitive edge for companies who create innovative business models enabled by advanced technologies. But when it comes to national economies, where and how is the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) enhancing competitiveness?

Wednesday 31st of May 2017

Thursday 18th of May 2017

The stereotype of the chess player is someone who is smart, logical and good at maths. This is why so many parents around the world are keen to get their children playing chess – in the hope that the game might help to boost their son or daughter’s intelligence levels and help them succeed in a wide variety of subjects.

Monday 8th of May 2017

South Africa faces tough choices before winter if it’s going to improve its flagging economy. Economic inequality is one of the highest in the world, GDP per capita has fallen, while youth unemployment is going up. The current economic model – consisting of a current account deficit that is higher than most of the other emerging market countries, combined with the rapidly increasing government indebtedness – is unsustainable.

Thursday 6th of April 2017

Mobility – the movement of people and goods – is both a fundamental right and a linchpin of the global economy. But without air travel, it can’t happen. Making air travel accessible to all is therefore crucial, and airlines, airports, regulators, governments and relevant stakeholders have a duty to work together to make this a reality.

Tuesday 4th of April 2017

People often ask me how I had the guts to move to Singapore when I’d barely even heard of the place just weeks before moving there. (In my defense: That was in the early 1990s, when the country was a lot less well-known in the West.) Or they wonder what made me decide to move to Moscow when I’d just signed on to stay in Singapore. Even switching from a highly successful career in consulting to an in-house role—and then back again more than a decade later—caused some serious eyebrow-raising among my associates.

Wednesday 22nd of March 2017

One of the best pieces of career advice I’ve ever received is to say yes as much as you can. Of course, there are so many situations where saying yes feels risky. But saying yes opens up opportunities for personal growth that you might not have known existed. Unfortunately, it’s in our nature to focus on what’s not going to work, causing us to avoid risky situations that could actually turn out to have positive outcomes.

Friday 3rd of March 2017

Since the end of World War II, the United States’ share in world GDP has fallen from nearly 30% to about 18%. Other advanced economies have also experienced sustained declines in their respective slices of the global pie. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the international monetary system.

Friday 13th of January 2017

Thursday 12th of January 2017

Recent explanations for the persistence of both the gender wage gap and the under-representation of women in top jobs have focused on behavioural aspects, in particular on differences in the responses of men and women to competition. This column suggests that it may not be competition itself that affects women, but the gender of their opponent. Analysis of data from thousands of expert chess games shows that women are less likely to win compared with men of the same ability, and that this is driven by women making more errors specifically when playing against men.

Friday 9th of December 2016

Tuesday 6th of December 2016

The US has maintained its third place on the Global Competitiveness Index for a third year in a row, but seriously lags behind other, much smaller countries in some of the most basic measures, the latest Global Competitiveness Report reveals.

Friday 11th of November 2016

Even if you’re a relatively happy person, you’re bound to run into people who are even more annoyingly happy than you. You know the type — that person who is chipper even before their morning coffee, who makes excessive use of exclamation points, whom bad news just rolls right off.

Monday 7th of November 2016

The economic consequences of individuals being persistently mistaken in their trust beliefs can be as large as those from not going to college. This column sheds light on how trust assessments are made. It documents a large role for moral considerations, which may ultimately contribute to the persistence of mistakes in trusting behaviour. Assessing the trustworthiness of others is a ubiquitous and fundamental process. If these trustworthiness assessments translate into trusting behaviour, understanding how ‘trust beliefs’ are formed is consequential. The current US presidential election may hinge on voter assessments of the trustworthiness of candidates. The victims of the US investment fraudster Bernie Madoff are reminders of the potentially severe financial consequences of misallocated trust. Kenneth Arrow (1972) famously asserted that trust is a prerequisite for most economic activity. A large and lively body of research in economics focuses on trust and its aggregate economic consequences, documenting strong relationships between general levels of trust between nations and everything from GDP growth to cross-country trade patterns (Knack and Zak 2001, Knack and Keefer 1996, Guiso et al. 2004, Tabellini 2008, Algan and Cahuc 2010, Guiso et al. 2009). Despite the economic importance of trust, surprisingly little is known about what causes us to trust others. Although previous research suggests that both pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors (‘betrayal’ or ‘control’) play a role, it is not clear which non-pecuniary factors are particularly important or persistent, or precisely how these factors affect trust (Bohnet and Zeckhauser 2004, Cox 2004, Ashraf et al. 2006, Bohnet et al. 2008, Butler and Miller 2015, Bolton et al. 2016). Furthermore, while common sense dictates one determinant of trust must be trust beliefs, even less is known about what shapes these beliefs or their relationship, if any, with trusting behaviour. Moral determinants of trust and trust beliefs

Monday 7th of November 2016

One of the fundamental questions in labour economics is why some workers are paid more than others within the same industry. This column uses data from adverts on a large US job website to investigate what’s behind these wage differences. The job titles used in adverts capture more variation between jobs than standard occupational classifications. By failing to recognise this, the previous literature has attributed too much of wage inequality to luck and too little to differences in worker and firm characteristics.

Friday 14th of October 2016

At the World Economic Forum, we’ve been measuring nations’ competitiveness for nearly four decades because we believe it is the best way to assess countries’ future productivity. Productivity, of course, is important as we believe it is the best way to boost income – after all you can only earn more if you work harder or smarter – and this, at the end of the day plays a large (but not exclusive by any means) factor in determining wellbeing.

Wednesday 5th of October 2016

As a real estate firm, JLL talks a lot about cities. For obvious reasons cities and the buildings they contain are at the centre of our business and, increasingly, cities represent the economic backbone of the world economy. This reality has led us into a new era of global competition where cities compete with each other for talent and capital. The winners will be those able to adapt to the changing world of work, answer new environmental challenges, and nurture the opportunities of new technologies. This battle will be won or lost on the basis of liveability as much as innovation.

Friday 30th of September 2016

Friday 30th of September 2016

Every year, thousands of trained and educated African and developing market expatriates choose to leave their host country in advanced economies to return home in the hope of playing a key role in their country’s development.